🏆 A League-Winning Backfield (Again?!)

The year is 2033. Dalvin Cook and DeAndre Hopkins are still waiting to find the perfect team to join…

In today’s Fantasy Life Newsletter presented by BetMGM:

In 2021, Rashaad Penny was the RB1 from Weeks 14-17, including a seismic, fantasy title-winning performance in Week 17 (185 total yards and 2 TDs).

From Week 5 on last year, Kenneth Walker was the RB8, turning in multiple week-winning performances against the Chargers and the Cardinals and finishing with 189 fantasy points:

Both were double-digit round picks.

Before Penny and Walker, it was Chris Carson. And before him, it was Marshawn Lynch (yes, I gracefully skipped over the Christine Michael era).

Noticing a theme here?

Not only do Pete Carroll and the Seahawks love to run the damn ball, but they also sneakily prefer to funnel carries through a single back.

Per The Athletic’s Michael-Shawn Dugar, Seattle has had only eight regular-season games in which two RBs recorded at least 10 carries since 2018.

✈️🧳 A New RB in Town

Despite selecting Walker 41st overall in the 2022 draft and watching him deliver on that draft capital, the Seahawks burned another Round 2 pick (No. 52) on RB Zach Charbonnet.

The fantasy market reacted in swift order, pushing Walker all the way down to the fifth round and cementing Charbonnet as a premium Zero RB selection around pick 100.

🔔🐄 So, How to Play It?

This is one of my favorite backfields in fantasy because history tells us that we are getting RB1 production at ambiguous backfield prices.

If Walker stays healthy, I believe he will be a league-winning RB selection who dances on graves in the RB Dead Zone. Here’s what Dugar said in a recent piece:

And if Walker gets hurt, Charbonnet is poised to do his best 2022 Walker impression and take over the backfield in league-winning fashion.

This is not a backfield I want to handcuff in tournament formats—their ceiling outcomes feel mutually exclusive with Seattle’s preference of mostly utilizing a single back—but I love targeting one or the other in virtually every draft.

Charbonnet is my second-most-drafted RB right now, and I’m starting to ramp up my Walker exposure (currently 8%):

Read on to see who The Fantasy Life staff has collectively selected the most in drafts and stay tuned for a piece tomorrow where I’ll outline a high-stakes draft that featured Walker as my Anchor RB.

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Do any lines stick out, you ask? Matt LaMarca has you covered.

LaMarca is betting: Raiders +3.5 (-110)

"...(Russell) Wilson looked cooked last season, and I’m not sure if anything can fix him. He quietly regressed in his final year with the Seahawks, and Geno Smith stepped right into the same situation and looked better. Smith was a career backup, so that doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence in Wilson going forward.

Meanwhile, the Raiders will transition from Derek Carr at QB to Jimmy Garoppolo. While that may sound like a downgrade on paper, Garoppolo graded out better than Carr in basically every metric last year. Part of that was playing for a loaded team in a Kyle Shanahan offense, but it’s possible that Las Vegas is actually slightly better off at QB with Garoppolo heading into 2023. Ultimately, I like the Raiders at anything better than +3.0."

🧃 Juicy rumors surrounding DeAndre Hopkins and Dalvin Cook? Could this team get both?!

📣 Josh Allen speaks up about Stefon Diggs rumors. Nice to get clarity on that.

🚀 2023 versions of last year's breakout fantasy football stars? Fun piece by Mike Clay.

🌟 A surprising stand out at Vikings camp. Don’t forget about him.

📉 What’s up with Patrick Mahomes? I don’t like this trend!

👀 Can your favorite QB drop dimes with their eyes closed? Adjust the ranks.

Our guy Ian Hartitz has been drafting a ton of best ball teams and today he’s sharing his favorite sweet spots on the draft board. Take it away, Ian…

Over the last two months, I have completed over 100 drafts over at Underdog Fantasy. The need for me to go outside and touch more grass aside, I’ve certainly had plenty of chances to go through good and bad drafts alike – leading to newfound clarity surrounding the specific positional ranges of the draft that I prefer to attack the most.

Drafting so many teams makes it irresponsible to be overly exposed to one specific player (Fantasy Life’s FREE Best Ball Hub can help you avoid that!), so it’s not wise for anyone to deploy the same exact draft strategy every time – especially considering how different pockets of value inevitably emerge in different draft rooms.

That said I have LOVED the myriad of options available in the following 12-pick ranges of early summer drafts.

Asking yourself, “What can I get in this round that I can’t get later?” is a good way to maximize value throughout the draft; these are the areas of drafts that I continuously find myself attempting to exploit.

📈 Round 2-3 RB

• Notable options: 

  • Nick Chubb (pick 16.8 ADP)

  • Jonathan Taylor (17)

  • Saquon Barkley (18.2)

  • Tony Pollard (21.8)

  • Derrick Henry (24.4)

  • Rhamondre Stevenson (26.6)

  • Josh Jacobs (28)

  • Breece Hall (30.6)

The WR avalanche over at Underdog Fantasy is a real phenomenon, and something that could carry over into more traditional re-draft formats come August.

There is essentially a full round of value at RB relative to where the position was going off the board in past years.

Historically, stud workhorse RBs would be pretty much gone by the end of the first round. But now? Some of the position’s best overall talents who also carry fantasy-friendly every-down roles are readily available in the middle of Round 2 and even into the early stages of Round 3.

There’s nothing wrong with upside young WRs like Chris Olave and DeVonta Smith, or dual-threat alien QBs like Jalen Hurts and Josh Allen; just realize the pickings of RBs who are: 1.) Good at football, 2.) Play in good offenses, and 3.) Have fantasy-friendly workloads, are few and far between after this tier of backs.

📈 Round 4 WR

• Notable options: 

  • Keenan Allen (pick 36.3 ADP)

  • Christian Watson (40.2)

  • Jerry Jeudy (40.6)

  • DeAndre Hopkins (43.1)

  • Drake London (43.6)

  • Terry McLaurin (44.6)

  • Mike Williams (46.1)

  • D.J. Moore (47)

The aforementioned WR avalanche is no joke and can’t be ignored, meaning this tier of players represents one of the last opportunities to get alpha No. 1 types who have the sort of high-end talent capable of booming inside of less-than-ideal offensive environments.

While none of these picks are exactly no-doubt slam dunks, it could be argued that they are still members of one big tier of WR2-type talents that starts around overqualified No. 2 WRs like Jaylen Waddle, DeVonta Smith and Tee Higgins in Round 2.

I would also pick Waddle and Smith ahead of these guys; their slightly lower target ceilings are more than made up for by their own personal talent and great offensive situation. Still, adding ADP into the equation makes this quite the premium to pay with guys like Allen, Watson, Jeudy and Moore in particular available multiple rounds later and fully expected to work as the undisputed No. 1 option in their respective passing attacks.

It’s not illegal or necessarily wrong to look at Jahmyr Gibbs or Joe Burrow in Round 4 depending on how your first few rounds played out, but I vastly prefer these WRs to guys like Najee Harris and Travis Etienne, who are expensive versions of cheaper RBs like James Conner/Cam Akers and Kenenth Walker, respectively.

Here at Fantasy Life, we LOVE best ball. You’ll catch our team in the Underdog draft lobbies every day. You can also watch our team draft and talk strategy on YouTube and use our best ball hub to analyze your own portfolio of teams. So yeah, we really love best ball. Now that we have been drafting for a few months, Jonathan took a look at who we have been selecting most often in our best ball drafts…

We crunched the numbers from more than 550 completed drafts to find who Fantasy Life’s favorite player through the first half of drafts has been.

So without further ado, Fantasy Life’s most drafted player is…Saints rookie RB Kendre Miller.

Miller has already been drafted more than 90 times by our team this summer. Although he is part of a crowded backfield, the third-round rookie has multiple paths to delivering value. He is talented enough to force his way onto the field, he is versatile enough to fill in for multiple roles if there is an injury ahead of him, and there is still the possibility of an Alvin Kamara suspension.

With an ADP in the 12th round (pick 138) our team clearly likes the cost-adjusted bet that Miller represents. I personally have 16% Miller in my best ball portfolio, and I often feel like he is the last available player of the tier of high-upside RBs in uncertain backfields.

But Miller isn’t the only rookie we like. I looked at the numbers for every position, and there were rookies popping up left and right.

A few of those players even feature on the list of our most drafted players at every position, which I have now deemed The All Fantasy Life Team.

🏆 The All Fantasy Life Team:

This group of players provides some interesting insights into how our team is approaching drafts.

🌡️ We’ve got rookie fever 

Among the other notable rookies that didn’t make the All Fantasy Life team are Anthony Richardson (our second most drafted QB), Roschon Johnson, Zach Charbonnet, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, and Jayden Reed, who are all being drafted at a high clip by our team.

We know rookies tend to peak late in the season when we need it most for best ball and our team clearly believes the 2023 class will deliver some league-winners.

📉 Still waiting for a dip in elite QB prices

Our team is generally avoiding the most-expensive QBs in favor of the mid-to-late-round upside bets like Richardson and Love.

Rounding out our top-5 most drafted at the position are Dak Prescott, Tua Tagovailoa, and Daniel Jones who all go in a similar range of drafts (rounds 8-10) when the talent at WR really dries up.

⚓ A clear favorite anchor RB

Tony Pollard is a bit of an outlier because he is the only highly-priced RB to crack our top 40 most drafted players, checking in at our second most drafted player overall. Given his second-round ADP, this makes Pollard the most significant stand our team is taking early in drafts.

🚢 We don’t want to miss the boat on elite TE 

Lastly, our team really likes the end of the tier for TEs with an elite season-long upside. Dallas Goedert, Kyle Pitts, and Darren Waller rank as three of our most frequently drafted TEs.

It’s no coincidence that this group comes off the board as the TEs 5 - 7 and are among the last guys that can comfortably be drafted as the first TE on a two-TE team. Waiting much longer to grab your first TE usually means you will need to take a third, which comes at the cost of depth elsewhere.